Military slang is colloquial language used by and associated with members of various military forces. This page lists slang words or phrases that originate with military forces, are used exclusively by military personnel, or are strongly associated with military organizations.

BOHICA (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again) is an item of acronym slang which grew to regular use amongst the United States armed forces during the Vietnam War.[1][2] It is used colloquially to indicate that an adverse situation is about to repeat itself, and that acquiescence is the wisest course of action. It is commonly understood as a reference to being sodomized. Although it originated in the United States military forces, and is still commonly used by United States Air Force fighter crew chiefs and armament crews, its usage has spread to civilian environments, used to describe unavoidable, unpleasant situations that have inconvenienced someone before and are about to yet again.

FUBAR (Fucked/Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition/Any Repair/All Reason), like SNAFU and SUSFU, dates from World War II. The Oxford English Dictionary lists Yank, the Army Weekly magazine (1944, 7 Jan. p. 8) as its earliest citation: "The FUBAR squadron. ‥ FUBAR? It means 'Fucked/Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition."[3]

SNAFU, which is widely used to stand for the sarcastic expression Situation Normal: All Fucked Up, as a well-known example of military acronym slang, however the original military acronym stood for "Status Nominal: All Fucked Up." It is sometimes bowdlerized to all fouled up or similar.[4] It means that the situation is bad, but that this is a normal state of affairs. It is typically used in a joking manner to describe something that's working as intended. The acronym is believed to have originated in the United States Marine Corps during World War II.[citation needed]

Time magazine used the term in their June 16, 1942 issue: "Last week U.S. citizens knew that gasoline rationing and rubber requisitioning were snafu."[5] Most reference works, including the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, supply an origin date of 1940–1944, generally attributing it to the U.S. Army.

Rick Atkinson ascribes the origin of SNAFU, FUBAR, and a bevy of other terms to cynical GIs ridiculing the Army's penchant for acronyms.[6]

In modern usage, snafu is sometimes used as an interjection, though it is mostly now used as a noun. Snafu also sometimes refers to a bad situation, mistake, or cause of trouble. It is more commonly used in modern vernacular to describe running into an error or problem that is large and unexpected. For example, in 2005, The New York Times published an article titled "Hospital Staff Cutback Blamed for Test Result Snafu".[8]

The attribution of SNAFU to the American military is not universally accepted: it has also been attributed to the British,[9] although the Oxford English Dictionary gives its origin and first recorded use as US military.[5]

In a wider study of military slang, Frederick Elkin noted in 1946 that there "are a few acceptable substitutes such as 'screw up' or 'mess up,' but these do not have the emphasis value of the obscene equivalent." He considered the expression SNAFU to be "a caricature of Army direction. The soldier resignedly accepts his own less responsible position and expresses his cynicism at the inefficiency of Army authority." He also noted that "the expression … is coming into general civilian use."[10]

^Rawson, Hugh (1995). Rawson's Dictionary of Euphemisms and Other Doubletalk: Being a Compilation of Linguistic Fig Leaves and Verbal Flourishes for Artful Users of the English Language. New York: Crown. ISBN978-0-517-70201-7.

^Elkin, Frederick (March 1946), "The Soldier's Language", American Journal of Sociology, The University of Chicago Press, 51 (5 Human Behavior in Military Society): 414–422, JSTOR2771105